My foreign policy is to say everyone else is wrong, then fundraise off it.
I think at some point we have to write Rand Paul off as being just a damn stupid person. More than that, though, we have to recognize that his stupidity all stems from the same obsession with his own self-promotion, as manifested with uncanny consistency in his pattern of blaming all the world's ills on that small subset of people he considers to be
possible presidential opponents.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Wednesday accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of helping to spur unrest in the Middle East that led to the current battle against militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
“One of the people I blame for a lot of this, frankly, is Hillary Clinton,” he said on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom.”
“The disaster that is Libya is now a breeding ground for terrorists and also a breeding ground for armament. I really do blame Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya for creating a lot of the chaos that is now spreading throughout the Middle East.”
It might also have a bit more to do with the actual damn war
in Iraq, the one that destabilized the country we're actually talking about here and the one that flooded the area with American weapons that ISIS has been able to procure with little effort, but none of that past history involves argle-bargle Hillary Clinton and you don't go on Fox News unless you're prepared to blame whatever the hell they throw at you, from the measles to ebola to immigration issues to insufficiently clean subways to the Entire Goddamn Iraq War And Resulting Aftermath on either Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or, if we're talking about anything even tangentially relating to black people, the devious Eric Holder. In Rand Paul's case it's Hillary Clinton because Barack Obama isn't running for anything anymore.
Rand Paul is thought by the people handing him checks to have inherited his father's hyper-noninterventionist foreign policy. This has always been a generous interpretation, as it presumes Rand Paul has at any point been able to articulate any internally consistent foreign policy other than reflexively objecting to whatever it is his political opponents of the moment do want, whether those opponents of the moment be possible presidential opponent Hillary Clinton or possible presidential opponent Insert Republican Name Here. That is how he has made his brand, and at no point has he given any solid evidence that he has substantive policy positions of his own other than that purely situational contrarianism. His crazy pa was at least willing to go to his political grave insisting the Iraq War was a terrible idea; Rand Paul has had to go through the more typical Republican gyrations of pretending he never heard of the thing, or that maybe he has but it hardly matters at this late date compared to the horrors brought about by Hillary Clinton.
Whatever you may think of American intervention in Libya, to claim that Libya was catalyst for a wave of chaos in the Middle East and specifically in Iraq is an argument that does not hold up to simple measurements in space-time. It did not happen that way. I know we are not supposed to point that out, and I also know that we are supposed to still marvel at how trillion-dollar overthrows of other nations are overwhelming Republican favorites when a Republican planner pens them and how actions that do not amount to a hundredth of that are Very Very Bad if a Republican was not the primary advocate, but even pretending to be surprised by that requires more effort than it's worth mustering. Of course it works that way.
Rand Paul is a cheap hack whose only foreign policy credentials consist of spewing whatever shallow half-thoughts the person most directly in front of him currently most wants to hear. Every idiot press member who asks him a question on these things deserves whatever self-promoting answer they get. The End.